


fight for your right to party

by gaypasta



Category: IT (2017), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Alcohol, F/F, Fluff, Implied Childhood Sexual Abuse, Implied Sexual Content, No Lesbians Die, Smoking, no beta we die like men, two girls dancing at the club because they're hella gay
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-02
Updated: 2019-07-02
Packaged: 2020-06-02 23:17:47
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,196
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19451518
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gaypasta/pseuds/gaypasta
Summary: Beverly found a part of herself in the wild girl with bright eyes who pulled her into a terrible dance every weekend. Beverly found a part of herself in Kay McCall.





	fight for your right to party

**Author's Note:**

> a req on tumblr! I shuffled my music and got Fight For Your Right To Party - Beastie Boys. very soft... very gay...

Atmospheres weighed heavy on Beverly - the unspoken sentences between feuding friends tightened her lungs, the gaze of unrequited love between two of her friends made her chest constrict in empathy, the emotions that come with laughter, love, trust, comfort were always roped in the air, heavy and suffocating like getting tangled in a damp bedsheet strung up on a washing line. Beverly loved her friends. She did, really. The constant waves of  _ love _ that bled from her freinds’ very souls were for her, too. Being accepted so easily, being invited into a blanket of open arms and warm bodies had turned her perspective of the world into something a lot softer, a lot warmer and filled with a lot more love.

The issue in this, however, was that Beverly - despite being filled to the point of bursting with love, with kindness, with passion - did not quite feel at ease with the feelings. She was safe, she knew she was safe - with little Eddie on her left and Ben on her right, Mike and Richie flipping through old comic books at her feet and Stan pointing out birds to Bill behind her - it was the safest she had ever felt in her entire life. 

Yet, she couldn’t help but feel as though the soft safety of her friends - of her boys - was like a cage, caged in like an animal behind a locked door with a key that bruised her chest with its hypocrisy. 

As  _ Beverly and the Boys _ grew up together with smiles splattered on their faces, knees scuffed and shoes muddy - the feeling faded over time, the cage walls melting away into group hugs and pressing up close to Ben during movies on Bill’s matted old pull-out couch. The pressure of being included and the need to prove her place had been flushed down the drain as had the vomit-stained crumples of toilet paper after Richie’s first drink as Beverly wiped at his sweat spotted forehead and carefully pulled his glasses from his face. 

Her love for her friends had been given its chance to blossom, Beverly opened the floodgates and it pulled them all in so close that Beverly had pondered if someone could have six soulmates. She loved Mike, he was strong, with broad shoulders and heavy muscles and when he spoke, everyone had listened closely and attentively. Mike was soft, too. Kind, with an almost unwavering temperament with enough patience to last a lifetime. He had shown Beverly that to be a man is to be kind, to be soft and to be gentle.    
  
Eddie was not so little anymore, at least, not to Beverly. He was small and slight of build - a runner’s build so he would say. His personality had exploded as his aspirator got thrown off of the cliff in the Quarry one summer afternoon. He was loud, confident and quick. Quick to quip, quick to speak his mind, quick to make his decisions and change them in the same step. Above all else - Eddie was quick to love. Eddie loved deeply and fiercely and Beverly loved him back just as such.

Beverly found peace in Stan, who was confident and proud, who was just as much of a sensitive man as he had been a boy, who spoke with a low voice but somehow managed to grab everyone’s attention. Stan, who despite being reserved and sensible - somehow always made everyone laugh the hardest when he made jokes. Stan was never afraid to say what he needed to say and Beverly never felt as grounded as when Stan assured her that he loved her. 

Richie had freed her - had pulled Beverly out of her insecurities and onto the top of a coffee table to dance, pulling her along in so many different things that she had never thought twice, following Richie with a cigarette in hand and breath barrelling out of her lungs as they danced on top of Bill’s plaid bed sheets. When Richie would pull her in for hard, playful kisses - pulling their mouths to smash into each other with no other movement - it had liberated her. She threw her key off of the cliff in the Quarry the next afternoon. 

Bill had helped her understand her emotions, he had picked his shovel and dug deep into Beverly’s subconscious, into her fears and into her repressed memories. Bill had dirt flecked on his legs from the rapid spinning of silver’s tires from all the nights he had raced over. Bill had told her hard truths that grabbed tight in her guts and squeezed menacingly at her lungs under the glow of Bill’s lampshade and his plaid sheets. It wasn’t her fault - Bill had taught her that with whispers of love and embracements. 

Ben had changed her life. Ben - who was so soft-hearted and sweet that Beverly could never bring herself to ever feel discomfort with, had admired her openly. Wove beautiful words of love and passion and fear and all sorts on the back of postcards, journals, napkins. All of them pressed between heavy books in her bookshelf. His words bled into her skin and filled her up with a new type of love - a love for  _ herself,  _ the most important type of love there is.

You see, you cannot fully love others until you can love yourself. You can not love someone, give them your everything and pour your entire life into the soul of someone else if you cannot do the same for yourself. Now Beverly could, thanks to her friends. 

Beverly had grew into all of them, she thinks. She was shaped by everyone around her in the most beautiful way possible. She had the strength and the presence of Mike, the passion of Eddie, the honesty of Stan, the kindness of Bill and the admiration for others like Ben. 

And the ability to let loose like Richie. 

Here she was - Beverly Marsh - full of love, full of passion and currently, full of mimosas. She moved through the house party like it was ballet, free and with grace - moving from conversation to conversation, from drink to drink and from room to room. 

The bass pumped heavily in her ears, her head throbbed in the best way possible and she felt a sense of freedom in being alone in a crowd of people. No one knew her - she was without reputation here, just another face in the crowd with no sad backstory, no rumours and none of her boys. It was just her - confident and happily being nudged and shouldered and shoved into person to person, being caught in more than a couple of dances and participating happily with a glint in her eye and a lipstick smudge on her mouth. 

When she was pulled into a dance - a purposeful tug on her forearm by a girl with wild eyes and an even wilder smile - she had felt a new flutter in her stomach that none of the endless nights, endless kisses, endless hugs with her friends had ever gifted her with. Beverly danced with her, spinning each other around and jumping around wildly like two children at their first disco. They had barely exchanged names before breaking apart after thirty-seven minutes of dancing, faces flushed red and smiles bright before they parted ways and sprinted as far away from the blue lights and sirens as they could. 

Kay McCall.

Kay McCall was always there, every house party, every rave, every friend’s birthday - Kay had found her and pulled her to the dance floor, their bodies moving more and more in sync every time. It was effortless, without thought and without embarrassment - when Beverly looked at the slim fitted girl with dark eyes, dark freckles and even darker hair, face always looking guilty of something, as if she was always harboring a secret and was rubbing it in your face that you didn’t know, Beverly felt as though she was looking at the last face on Earth she would ever want to see. A face so familiar, a smile so nostalgic that Beverly dreamed of it every night, she dreamed of it every day, too.

When Kay pulled her in for a heavy kiss - a lot different than the mid-dance heavy kisses Richie had pulled her in - Beverly moved into her as if she was moving into the air after floating underwater for centuries. Kissing Kay felt like breathing, felt like something so natural and so organic that she had felt at a loss when she pulled away. 

It wasn’t as though Beverly’s life had clicked into place. The Earth didn’t shift, her entire world didn’t tilt on its axis. It was not as obvious - it didn’t come as a shock though, it was as natural and organic as a seed blossoming into a flower, or as a cloud slowly emptying the rain onto the streets below - starting light, a drizzle, then a shower, then pouring, then lashing. It had been gradual, every weekend dance-fuelled kiss, every cigarette passed between the two like teenagers sharing their first smoke, every wordless conversation, every brush of their fingers, every song belted out in unison - it had happened so gradually that Beverly hadn’t even realised. 

Beverly hadn’t realised that she had begun to pick out her nicest clothes, or forgo the lipstick because it ended up smudged all around her mouth, or how she skirted around the dance floor - not even pretending to do anything other than search for a chocolate ponytail and fiery eyes. She hadn’t realised how their hands had played with each other’s as they stood in the alleyways, smoking filtering out of their mouths as they giggled at the drunkards being tossed out like day old leftovers.

Beverly hadn’t realised as she stayed out later and later, following this wonderful girl out through parks, through streets and through dirty alleyways, laughing and feeling an entirely new type of safe the entire time. Stumbling home long after the sun had kissed the horizon, with kisses peppered over her mouth, with tired eyes and with a breathless smile.

Beverly hadn’t realised when they went for coffee, when they went for food, when they kissed under the mistletoe in the Christmas Markets, faces red and giggling into each other’s mouths as they accidentally fed their hot cocoa to the pavement. Beverly hadn’t realised when they explored each other’s bodies, alcohol long danced out of their system and hair matted to their foreheads with the sweat of the club under the comfort of Kay’s blankets.

Beverly hadn’t realised when she found herself getting pulled back to Kay’s every Saturday night - walking through dirty alleyways and suburban neighbourhoods with their hands firmly pressed together, stopping to dance around street lamps and to pick up bugs. Spending the late hours of the night wrapped up together, exploring each other’s minds with conversations under a white ceiling and within warm orange walls, with words whispered into the sheets and laughter spilled into each other’s necks.

Beverly hadn’t realised when she found her clothes that she had left behind neatly stored in a mostly empty drawer. It didn’t stay mostly empty for long, as Beverly and Kay found themselves dancing to whatever spilled through the crackling radio on weeknights, kissing each other softly on the cheek before running off to work the next morning.

Beverly never  _ realised _ that she was deeply in love with Kay McCall. There was never a dawning moment, there was never a stall from either girl when the words slipped out of her mouth. It had been said before, in hundreds of different ways, under the guise of something else - but the meaning had been there, the feelings of love, of care, of passion, of friendship, had been said in hundreds of ways before and it was as much of a normal sentence as any other. It had never really occurred to Beverly at all that she had fallen in love, it just was. It was an undisputed fact, the moment that Beverly had been pulled into dancing along to a Queen song at one of her old college friend’s house party by a girl with a smile that told Beverly it was going to eat her alive - it was written. 

They never stopped partying, they never stopped dancing along to whatever terrible remix of a classic song the DJ saw fit to play - the only difference was that they did so together, in a different way. 

Beverly had found herself more in Kay than she ever knew was possible. Kay brought out all of the best things in herself. Her boys had tried, and they had succeeded in their own rights, they still meant the world to her and she still loved them with every single part of her soul and the love, at this point, after all this time, was unconditional. As much as she loved her boys, the final piece to Beverly was a girl. A girl who made Beverly whole again, a girl who Beverly had loved in an entirely different way than she had ever done before. A girl who loved her back just as much.

They were still both shitty dancers, though.


End file.
